John Ashbery’s earlier Selected Poems (Viking, 1985) drew on the first thirty years of his career, from Some Trees (1956) to A Wave (1985). The new Selected covers the twenty years since 1985 in roughly the same number of […]
Artists are no fun once they have been discovered.
John Ashbery, “The Invisible Avant-Garde” (1968)
Has success spoiled John Ashbery? By no means, as I shall suggest below, if we are talking about such recent volumes as Can You Hear, Bird (1995). But the current discourse on Ashbery’s work is something else […]
One of the most acclaimed poetry books of 1956 was Richard Wilbur’s The Things of This World, published by Harcourt, Brace. Here is the title poem:
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple.
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning […]
Some twenty years ago, the poet Douglas Crase remarked that contrary to the […]